


Lifeline

by CheapLemonIceLolly



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: M/M, POV Outsider, Red String of Fate, Soulmates, short and sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-04-07 01:33:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14070015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CheapLemonIceLolly/pseuds/CheapLemonIceLolly
Summary: Nick’s always been able to see things other people can’t see.





	Lifeline

**Author's Note:**

> I've been writing a lot lately but not finishing anything, so I asked for some fluffy prompts on tumblr a couple of weeks ago and thought I'd post my favourites over here as well. Trying to write a complete story in under 2000 words is hard for me, but good practice! 
> 
> From the anon request: "if mcstrome prompts are also acceptable then I’d like to requires dylan/connor, red string of fate, please!" Set in the beginning of this season.

Nick’s always been able to see things other people can’t see. The lines of fate that connect people, invisible to most, come in and out of view around him like a faltering internet connection, like the visual equivalent of radio static. He can’t see them on everyone he meets, but they get easier to pick up on people he knows well, especially people he spends a lot of time with.

It’s not really that useful an ability, as a hockey player - people like him usually become, like, politicians and marriage counsellors, not professional athletes - but it mostly doesn’t hurt either, it’s just...irrelevant. He’d probably be better at it if he practiced more, but there doesn’t seem much point. He doesn’t usually tell people about it, either his ability or the specific things he sees, because people can get kind of touchy about it, like he’s prying into their private thoughts or something. Which is fair, but it’s not like Nick can help it. And it’s not like he knows that much, anyway. Like, he can’t tell who’s connected to whom, not unless they’re both in the same place at the same time and he can literally see the connection, like an impossibly fine red thread tied between their fingers. He just knows there’s someone important somewhere.

Anyway, whatever, he’s got a weird way of seeing things, like emotional synaesthesia, and he doesn’t think about it that much because there’s not much call to. He’s so busy with Yotes camp and then with getting sent down and then getting settled in Tucson that he doesn’t notice anything on anyone until a couple of weeks after Stromer gets sent down after him, when they’re at practice.

“Hey hold still,” he tells Dylan, spotting something trailing from his sleeve. “You’ve got a loose thread or something.”

He takes his glove off and tries to grab the thread but Dylan lifts his arm to look at the same time and pulls it out of reach. It must be off his jersey or something, a seam unravelling, because it’s red. Or is it coming out of his glove?

“What?” Dylan frowns, turning his arm this way and that. “I do?”

“It’s right there, hang on, just let me…” Nick makes a grab for the thread again, but he still can’t get it, and it’s then that he finally realises what he’s actually seeing. “Oh wait. Never mind. I must have imagined it.”

Dylan gives him a weird look. “I think the stress is getting to you,” he says. He pats Nick on the helmet and skates off, and Nick watches the red string drifting after him, fading in and out of focus along its fluttering length.

He hasn’t seen one that clearly in ages. Whoever Dylan’s soulmate is, their connection’s really something else.

*

Normally strings that vivid, the kind Nick could mistake for something real and solid enough to actually touch, belong to, like, couples. His grandparents have a connection like that, and now he’s playing with actual adults Nick’s met a few guys who have those kinds of bonds with their wives. But Dylan’s _twenty_. What kind of twenty-year-old is already that committed to someone? He’s never even heard Dylan mention a girlfriend or anything.

And yet, the thread is there, sure and steady as anything, following him around wherever he goes. When Dylan talks he wraps it mindlessly around his fingers like it really is real, like he’s playing cat’s cradle with his...his heart? Soul? Nick honestly doesn’t really know what it is. He supposes it is real, to Dylan anyway, even if he doesn’t actually know it’s there. And it’s real to whoever’s on the other end of it, of course.

Nick doesn’t ask, but he pays attention. When they play the string streams behind Dylan like a thin red banner. It’s kind of especially beautiful then. Like, Nick’s never really thought about the threads he sees aesthetically, but Dylan’s red string goes well with hockey, he thinks. It looks good on the ice, like it belongs there.

Dylan’s pretty obsessive about hockey. Like, okay, they all are, obviously, but Dylan watches a lot of NHL games in his spare time, Nick’s noticed. Not just the Yotes games they all watch so they can keep up to speed with how things are where they all hope they’ll be eventually, but other teams too. He always watches every Oilers game, for example, even when they’re on the road. If they’re playing when an Oilers game is on, he watches the feed back later, sometimes watches is on his phone on the bus while everyone else is trying to sleep, the light of the screen flickering over his face in ice white and toxic orange while he twines his invisible red string between his fingers.

It makes sense, Nick thinks. His brother’s on the Oilers now, so there’s a family connection. Oh, and there’s Connor too, obviously. It’s good to keep tabs on old teammates.

Nick watches games with him sometimes, the Yotes games where they’re both privately trying to imagine where they’d each slot in to the lines (who they’d replace, what passes they would have managed better and shots they would have made), and the Oilers games where Dylan keeps up a running commentary of every cool McJesus-y thing Connor does as if Nick’s not, like, right there watching it with his own eyes. But to be fair, the cool McJesus-y shit is pretty fun to watch. Nick even puts up with not skipping over the intermission coverage when they watch old games, because Dylan likes watching the interviews and Nick is a good and accommodating friend.

“He has to know that beard looks fucking stupid,” Dylan says, shaking his head at one of Connor’s intermission interviews. Nick considers telling him that people in glass houses with seriously embarrassing moustaches shouldn’t throw stones, but before he can Dylan says, “I’m gonna tell him, just to make sure he knows,” and wanders out of the room with the phone already to his ear, red string coiling around his forearm. Nick just has time to hear how unbelievably soft and fond Dylan’s voice goes as he says, “Hey, your beard looks fucking stupid,” and then laughs, before he’s out of earshot.

_Oh_ , Nick thinks, with sudden clarity. Duh. Of course.

*

When Dylan tells him he’s been called up, Nick doesn’t even feel jealous for a second. Dylan tries to do the whole don’t-worry-I-know-you’ll-be-next thing and Nick just waves him off with a laugh. “Who are you playing first?” he says, sitting on the end of the bed while Dylan runs around like an idiot, frantically pulling things out of drawers and stuffing them in his suitcase.

Dylan’s smile gets, if possible, even wider as he looks up from an armful of socks to answer. “The Oilers,” he says happily. “We’re flying to Edmonton, like, right away.”

Nick kind of knew the answer before he asked, really, because that’s how fate works. The threads that bind people to each other can stretch and bend and tangle and never break, but they still draw the people they connect back to each other eventually, like a rubber band snapping back. That’s the whole point. He can see Dylan’s red string more clearly than ever now, and the way it pulls taut every so often, like someone’s tugging on it. Dylan doesn’t see it, but every time it happens Nick thinks he moves a little faster, smiles a little harder.

“Edmonton,” he says again, and laughs. “What are the chances?”

Nick looks at the little string that’s getting brighter and bolder and redder by the minute, and just shakes his head.

“I don’t know. Pretty good, I’d say.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm @lemonicelolly on tumblr, follow for more soft fluff (actually all the soft fluff ends up here eventually, but there are more gif reblogs and flailing in the tags over there).


End file.
